BOOKS.
POOR MISS FINCH.*
*THERE is really wonderful ingenuity and originality in the plot of Poor Miss Finch, and when we have said thus much, we have said all we can for it, for the story is not at all to our liking. Mr. Wilkie Collins's style of caricature is copied not from the humorous, but from the mechanical side of Mr. Dickens's genius. His comic business is like the comic business provided by such characters in Mr. Dickens's works as Cousin Feenix, who cannot walk straight, but is always carried off by his legs at right angles to the direction in which he intends to go; or Mr. Wemmick, in Great Expectations, who " posts " biscuit down his throat, which is always -called "the post office ;" or Mr. Matthew Pocket, in the same story, -who always lifts himself up by the hair when in despair. The -comic business in Poor Miss Finch is provided by a mean little parson with a deep bass voice (the heroine's father), who is proud of hearing his voice, and of appealing to "inscrutable Provi- dence ;" and by his second wife, who is always damp, and always ..carrying about a damp baby, a pockethandkerchief, and a novel, the dampness of the mother and child being the inexhaustible well-spring of the comic business of the book. We smile at this limp woman the first time she is introduced, with her baby, novel, And pockethandkerchief ; we fail to smile the second time, and we are weary beyond all expression of her and her baby, and her 'novel and pockethandkerchief, and of her husband, with his mean person and deep bass voice and "inscrutable Providence," before .the end of the first volume, after which we should carefully skip 'them all, if we were not reading with a reviewer's duty to the book. We extract a specimen, that our readers may judge for -themselves whether our verdict on this comic business is too harsh. .Parson Finch loquitur :— " Yes! yes ! yes ! ' he said. 'You have a superficial acquaintance with the facts. But you are far from being aware of what my daughter's sudden removal of herself from my roof really means. Now don't be 'frightened, Madame Pratolungo I and don't excite Mrs. Finch! (How are you, my dear? how is the child? Both well. Thanks to an overruling Providence, both well.) Now, Madame Pratolungo, attend to this. My -daughter's flight—I say flight advisedly : it is nothing less—my ,daughter's flight from my Souse means (I entreat you to be calm !)- 'means, Amanita Blow dealt at me, by the family of my first wife.' Dealt at me,' repeated Mr. Finch ; heating himself with the recollection .of his old feud with the Batehfords—' dealt at me by Miss Batchford ,(by Lucilla's aunt, Madame Pratolungo), through my unoffending second wife, and my innocent child.—Are you stare you are well, my dear? are you sure the infant is well ? Thank Providence !- 'Concentrate your attention, Madame Pratolungo! Your attention is wandering. Prompted by Miss Batchford, my daughter has left my roof. Ramsgate is a mere excuse. And how has she left it ? Not only without first seeing Me—I am Nobody !—but without showing the slightest sympathy for Mrs. Finch's maternal situation. Attired in her travelling costume, my daughter precipitately entered (or to use my wife's graphic expression, 'bounced into ') the nursery, while Mrs. Finch was administering maternal sustenance to the infant. Under circum- -stances which might have touched the heart of a bandit or a savage, my 'unnatural daughter (remind me, Mrs. Finch; we will have a little Shakespeare to-night ; I will read King Lear) my unnatural daughter announced without one word of preparation that a domestic affliction would prevent you from accompanying her to Ramsgate.—Grieved, dear Madame Pratolungo, to hear of it. Cast your burden on Providence. Bear up, Mrs. Finch ; bear up.—Having startled my wife with this harrow- ing news, my daughter next shocked her by declaring that she was .going to leave her father's roof, without waiting to bid her father good- bye. The catching of a train, you will observe, was (no doubt at Miss Batchford's instigation) of more importance than the parental embrace or the pastoral blessing. Leaving a message of apology for Me, my heartless child (I use Mrs. Finch's graphic language again—you have • Poor Alias Fine.h. A Novel. By Wilkie Collins. 3 vols. London: Bentley. fair, very fair powers of expression, Mrs. Finch)—my heartless child hennaed out' of the nursery to catch her train ; having, for all she knew, or cared, administered a shock to nay wife which might have soured the fountain of maternal sustenance at its source. The, e is where the Blow falls, Madame Pratolungo! Haw do I know that acid disturbance is not being communicated at this moment, instead of wholesome nourishment, between mother and child ? I shall prepare you an alkaline draught, Mrs. Finch, to be taken after meals. Don't speak; don't move ! Give me your pulse.'"
That sort of thing, not unamusing at first, becomes insufferably tedious when liberally introduced sandwich-fashion throughout the three volumes for the supposed comic effect. And the comic element, such as it is, in connection with Madame Pratolungo,—the widow of a South-American patriot, —who tells most of the story, her reminiscences of her late husband and his "fine mahogany colour," with the episodes of her "good papa's" matrimonial enterprises, are much of the same kind,—farcical at first, with a tendency to weary.
These extravagances, however, would not neutralize our admi- ration for the extraordinary ingenuity and skill of the story, if the graver characters had much merit. But the blind girl herself, Parson Finch's daughter by his first wife, who is the heroine and centre of everything, and on the beauty and force of whose cha- racter everything depends, seems to us one of the least attractive characters in modern fiction. We expect to find in the picture of a blind girl who is to be the centre and life of a story, something of the grandeur of character which so often belongs to that order of misfortune, and especially some gleams of that spiritual and even visionary light which does not indeed by any inevitable necessity brighten the darkness of such a lot, but which experience shows to be at least not uncommon in connection with it, and which is in some sense ideally necessary for the purposes of such a story. The character of Lucille, on the contrary,—though she is spoken of by Madame Pratolungo as her "darling," and with all sorts of terms of endearment throughout the story,—is entirely without the slightest element of moral or spiritual beauty. She is first introduced to us as leading a life of selfish isolation, shut off from her father's rectory and the noise and worry of his large second family in a separate house, into which she seems exceedingly careful not to let her noisy and tiresome half-brothers and sisters intrude, and where she lives in somewhat epicurean ease on an independent income. No doubt she allows her father a very liberal part of her income, but beyond that her chief object seems to be to keep him and his limp wife and untidy family as much at a dis- tance as possible. When she falls in love she shows devotion enough indeed, but also so much of the selfish and self-absorbed features of the passion that everybody is afraid to speak the truth to her where it is likely to be painful, and her irrit- able temper is made the occasion of several of the most skilfully contrived incidents of the story. If Mr. Wilkie Collins felt it desirable to make so much fun of a canting parson as he does, or tries to do, of Mr. Finch and his "inscrutable Pro- vidence," it would have been well, we think, to give a little relief to his picture by painting, in the daughter, some of those nobler spiritual traits which make religion more like its true self. But he does not give us this relief. Lucilla's story is one continuous history of feverish love and uncontrolled self-will. She is so utterly engrossed in her love that it presents the aspects of a selfish and pre-occupying passion, far from lovely and most in- considerate of others, throughout its course. She is almost in- capable of the smallest self-restraint, and after she has regained her eyesight loses it again, mostly through the childish wilfulness and impatience which prevent her from attending to her doctor's orders and the plainest dictates of duty and common-sense. In short, if Lucille were not blind, she would be an object of something like dislike to the reader, and as it is, the pity felt for her misfortune and helplessness has to do duty instead of any natural charm in her character. She is simply a pretty, wilful, self-absorbed girl without sight, and without the smallest glimpse of those bright spiritual vistas which we are apt,—no doubt with more warrant from the imagina- tive idealism which makes such gifts seem specially appro- priate to the blind than from the strict warrant of experience,—to ascribe to the victims of this particular misfortune. We do be- lieve, however, that patience and resignation which amount, if not to any high gift of faith, to the most chastening of moral ele- ments of character, are much more common in the blind than in those who have to endure no such permanent and constantly-felt privation ; and we think it a defect in this study even as a study, and a much greater defect in the novel as a work of art, that instead of these qualities having been attributed to Lucille, she is characterized by a special impatience, irritability, and wilfulness
of temper. Perhaps the only pleasant relations in the book are those between her and her oculist ; and even there she shows her gratitude to him for restoring her sight, chiefly by flying in the face of the positive orders he gives her which are abso- lutely necessary for its preservation. As a work of art, then, we cannot in the least praise Poor Miss Finch. A book in which commiseration has to do duty for sym- pathy and admiration is not one entitled to much praise. No doubt Mr. Wilkie Collins likes his own heroine better than he makes us like her ; but certainly a more unspiritual character than Lucille's, disciplined as it should have been by a life-long trial of the gravest kind, it would be difficult to conceive.
When we pass beyond the moral psychology of the plot to its optical psychology, it is far easier to speak with praise. No machi- nery more original and ingenious has been devised in our day, and though there are points on which we strongly believe that Mr. Wilkie Collins is mistaken, it is obvious he has very carefully studied the optical psychology of blindness, and the optical pheno- mena accompanying the first restoration of the blind to sight.
We will not betray the plot, but only state that it depends on the exact likeness between two twin brothers (both of whom are in love with Lucille), and on the discoloration of one of them by the use of nitrate of silver to cure epilepsy ;—Mr. 'Wilkie Collins dating his story (very likely intentionally, and if so, very cleverly) a few years before bromide of potassium, which, we may assure him, is a far surer cure for epilepsy of this kind (not caused by malforma- tion of the brain) than ever was nitrate of silver, and which does not discolour at all or produce any other bad effect, came into general recognition amongst medical men. Lucille has the dread which blind people so often feel for dark colours, and the brother whose bright complexion has been turned into slate-colour through the use of nitrate of silver, does not dare tell her the truth, —the pain of the plot, of course, depending on her mistake between the two brothers when she is temporarily restored to sight. We believe that Mr. Collins is quite accurate as to the facts which he so cleverly popularizes in relation to the complete failure of Lucille to distinguish by her new-found vision the objects previ- ously familiar to her touch till she has taught herself afresh by, at one and the same time, handling and looking at an object.
We believe he is quite right in depicting her disappointment that her favourite colours (the bright colours) are not brighter than they are when she first sees them after the cataract is removed. But we are strongly disposed to doubt whether Mr. Collins has gone nearly far enough in this direction. The scene in which Lucille breaks away from the oculist to try her sight for the first time is, as we believe, erroneous in giving her so much power to interpret rightly what she sees ; and so much more power than Mr. Collins himself attributes to her in a later scene. She has been blind not exactly from birth, but from within a year of her birth, and she is twenty-two when her sight is restored. It is hardly possible that any memory whatever of her few months of baby vision should remain to help her now, and yet she is represented as discriminating at once not only the persons from the things in the room, but the men from the women, and as picking out one of these men as her lover. We do not believe that if the people in the room were quite still,—as they are depicted as being,—she could even so much as have discriminated, by sight alone, the living beings from the furniture of the room on her very first use of vision ; and we are all but sure that she could not hive discriminated the women from the men, or, of the men, distinguished the young from the old.
The following is the brief account of her experience :—
"Feeble as it was at the first trial of it, her sense of sight was suffi- ciently restored to enable her to distinguish objects dimly. Of the three persons who had offered themselves to view on the right-hand side of the door, one (Mrs. Finch) was a woman; another (Mr. Finch) was a short, grey-headed, elderly man ; the third (Nugent), in his height— which she could see—and in the colour of his hair—which she could see —was the only one of the three who could possibly represent Oscar."
Now, unless some reminiscence of babyhood may have helped her in a way we cannot comprehend,—and we admit, of course, that our stock of experience of this subject is very scanty,—Lucilla could not have known that the visual impression produced by either man or woman had any connection with the associations gathered from the sense of touch which she as a blind woman had formed ; we are still more confident that the signs by which we dis- criminate between a man and woman would have had no meaning at all for her untried vision ; and we are absolutely sure that the words "short," "grey-headed," "elderly," as she as a blind woman understood them, could not in the least have described the impres- sion on her retina when she was using her vision for the first time. Indeed Mr. Wilkie Collins himself virtually admits this when he paintsLucilla in a subsequent scene (and therefore when she had had
somewhat more experience) as totally unable to find out by sight- what shape the objects presented to her vision are, and of what colour the colours are, except that she recognizes a dark colour as some- thing disagreeable to her. Now, if she could not recognize in a round object what she (in her blindness) had understood by round,. nor in a square object what she (in her blindness) had understood by square, how is it possible she could know a man when she say him, or distinguish him from a woman, or distinguish anything by sight as "short," when the only meaning of " short " to her must have been a distance less than ordinary through which she had to. raise her hand from the ground, in passing from a man's feet to his head, or recognize "grey," a colour she had never seen (and which,. by the way, having more of white in it, would probably have pleased her better than the colour of the twin brothers' hair, unless that was very unusually light)? On the whole, we are satisfied that this most critical scene was imagined in contravention of the sound psychological doctrine of Mr. Collins's own book, and of all that we have as yet learned on this subject from experience. This. error, however, if, as we are pretty sure, it be one, does not detract from the very great merit of Mr. Wilkie Collins's most ingenious- and striking plot. We only wish he had worked it out in a tale that had more in it of the higher elements of the novelist's art, and especially in relation to a heroine who had commanded our sympathy and admiration as well as our compassion.
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